Hanging by a Thread

Fukushima Daiichi Reactor building 4 and exposed fuel pool
Image source: Asahi Shimbun

Hanging by a Thread
Posted HERE by Mark Sircus – Director on 27 April 2012

1,565 fuel rods translates into 460 tons of nuclear fuel stored in pool in a barely intact building on its third and fourth floors. If the storage pool breaks and runs dry, the nuclear fuel inside will overheat and explode. The worst-case scenario drawn up by the government includes not only the collapse of the No. 4 reactor pool, but also the disintegration of spent-fuel rods from all the plant’s other reactors. The wall of the south side is falling apart at reactor No. 4 and Dr. Helen Caldicott said she would evacuate her family from Boston if it did.

Consolo says, “If this pool collapses, as Senator Wyden is now saying too, we would face a mass extinction event from the release of radiation in those rods. This may be the most important thing you ever pay attention to for the sake of your family, friends, your neighbors, every one you know and meet, all of humanity.”

What Can Be Done?

Spent reactor fuel cannot be simply lifted into the air by a crane as if it were routine cargo. In order to prevent severe radiation exposures, fires and possible explosions, it must be transferred at all times in water and heavily shielded structures into dry casks. As this has never been done before, the removal of the spent fuel from the pools at the damaged Fukushima-Dai-Ichi reactors will require a major and time-consuming reconstruction effort and will involve charting in unknown waters. Reports indicate that things are so hopeless at the plant that workers are not even working on weekends and certainly governments around the world have not gotten together in a desperate Manhattan Project[1] (in reverse) to save humanity.

Full report HERE